Gujarati

Gujarati literature traditionally begins its devotional history with Narsinh Mehta, the fifteenth century Vaishnava poet of Junagadh revered as the language's adi kavi, its first poet. His padas, songs of Krishna devotion, and his prabhatiyan, morning hymns still sung at dawn, established Gujarati as a language of bhakti, and his Vaishnava Jana To, the song defining the true devotee as one who feels the pain of others, became its most famous single text. After him the line runs through the woman saint poet Mirabai, whose songs circulate in Gujarati versions, the seventeenth century Akha's sharp philosophical verse, and the eighteenth century poets Premanand and Dayaram, whose garbi songs joined devotion to the round dances of Gujarat.

The garba dance songs of the Navratri festival, sung to the Goddess in autumn across Gujarat and its diaspora, keep this devotional song culture in vigorous public performance. Gujarati religious literature is not only Hindu. The Jain community of Gujarat, among the language's most diligent patrons, produced centuries of Gujarati commentary, hymnody and didactic literature, and the Parsi Zoroastrians of Gujarat made the language their own, translating prayers and composing religious texts in Parsi Gujarati, so that three religions share the language's classical devotional shelf.

Modern Gujarati religious culture bears the stamp of two nineteenth and twentieth century movements with global reach. The Swaminarayan tradition, founded in Gujarat in the early nineteenth century, holds its core texts in Gujarati, the Shikshapatri's precepts and the Vachanamrut's recorded discourses of its founder, and its temple building diaspora has carried Gujarati liturgy, scripture reading and hymnody to East Africa, Britain and North America, where some of the largest Hindu temples outside India conduct their devotional life substantially in Gujarati.

The second figure is Mohandas Gandhi, who wrote his autobiography and much of his religious and moral prose in Gujarati, translated the Bhagavad Gita into Gujarati as the Anasakti Yoga, and built his ashram prayer meetings around a Gujarati devotional core in which Narsinh Mehta's Vaishnava Jana To held the central place, so that a fifteenth century Gujarati hymn became the ethical signature of a worldwide political movement. The trading diaspora that carried Gujarati around the Indian Ocean also carried its religious institutions, Hindu temples, Jain derasars and Ismaili jamatkhanas, the last preserving devotional literature in Gujarati among the Khoja community. Few regional languages of India support so wide a devotional geography.